Christianity

Calling

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The term “calling” is a serious topic, both for ministers and the people who call on them.  It implies not simply a “hiring”, but an endowment of purpose beyond what the minister and the congregation have.  It brings in a third party, the Holy Spirit, who acts as the one who inspires and confirms the direction of this person to that place for those people.  It’s pretty strong stuff.  It often brings up a lot of reflection and anxiety on the part of clergy: “What am I called to do?”  “Is this my own desire or God’s?”  “How can I be sure?”

Perhaps the most troublesome is the question that occasionally comes up after a call to a position of ministry, “did I just mess up?”

After I graduated from seminary I was “called” to a position right away.  It seemed ideal – it was a church I knew, where I wanted to work, doing what I wanted to do.  It was like a gift was just dropped in my lap.  To confirm my call the senior pastor and dozens of others laid their hands on me and prayed over me.  It was  a spiritually and emotionally charged moment.  I felt like everything was right.

However very soon I discovered that everything was not right.  I immediately was bashing into other leaders in the church who didn’t want to hear what I had to say.  I felt marginalized.  I found myself not in agreement with how things were done but had no outlet within the church to hear me out.  After a while, it got so bad that my wife actually quit attending the church where I was an assistant pastor!  I remember thinking, “did I mess this up?”  I wondered if I had mistook God’s calling for my own desires.

Looking back at it now I can see that I was called to that place for that time, but that the calling wasn’t what I expected it to be.  I don’t think that God makes mistakes, nor do I think that this was somehow out of God’s plan.  I was called to be there, but I think it was to show me that I was called to do something other than what I intended.  God used me, and when that particular call was over He called me back out again to hospice ministry.  That doesn’t invalidate the prior call at all.  In fact, I don’t think I would be doing what I’m called to do now if I hadn’t been called into that mess.

I faced a similar paradigm shift last week.  I found myself really struggling, both in CPE and my job.  I felt stuck, frustrated, tired and emotionally drained.  When I started CPE over a year ago, someone asked how long I was going to do that.  I thought I could do it as long as I could foresee.  I didn’t see any changes on the horizon, and didn’t really see the need to change.  However as I began growing through CPE, I found myself getting worn out with the status quo at work.  I wasn’t “feeling it” anymore.  I still had passion for my work, just not passion for that part of my work.  Like I told the group, “I’m just tired of all the ___ dying.”  One member of the group later commented that it looked like I was in mourning.  Indeed I was!

With the help of my CPE supervisor and the group I was able to see that I really was just stuck in this corner, unable to turn left or right.  I needed to see that I had lost my passion and needed to refocus.  In the past my instinct was just to try harder and push through.  However there was no more pushing through.  I had to back out and try a different direction.  In doing so, I was able to see a new focus for ministry: the people I work with.  I’d already moved into much more of a managerial role, and needed to cut loose some of what I was holding on to.  When I did that, I found renewed energy and depth.

Had my calling been wrong?  Absolutely not.  God put me there for that purpose for that time.  And I could not be doing what I am doing now if I hadn’t been there.  My calling changed, and now I can even see that it is not a huge a change.  The hard part in making that adjustment was seeing that I needed to make it – I couldn’t try harder, it was done.

Surviving Hospice

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I often hear people, when I tell them what I do, respond with something akin to “I don’t know how you do it”.  Some days I can respond with “I enjoy what I do” or “I meet so many interesting people” or something similar.  Other times I think “I don’t know either!”  So I brought up this question to myself – how does one survive working in hospice?

Self-care self-care self-care self-care…

Easy to say and harder to do!  But that’s precisely the core of survival here.  There’s lots of good material out there on ways to take care of yourself to avoid burnout: art, time off, reframing, maintaining good boundaries, etc.  All of these are good and beneficial.  However two other things are required and are even more important.

First, you have to know you need to take care of yourself.  More often than not, it takes a meltdown or crisis situation to show me that I need to take care of myself.  When I’m stressed I tend to pull in and try to shove through whatever storm is blowing in my face.  My concentration is usually on going forward, not stopping to rest.  In the middle of stress I think our tendency is to do just that – get out of it as quickly as possible by surging onward even when we’re exhausted.  I’ve read more than one account, though, of mountaineers who ignored their own internal warning signs of exhaustion and fatigue and, rather than stop to rest, pushed on through the stress only to walk off the mountain.  I can fall in to that same trap.  But it’s amazing how even just a brief adjustment – for me it was a day working at home rather than the office – can rejuvenate and reframe.

Self awareness comes only with time and honesty with yourself.

Second, I must actually do what I need to do to take care of myself.  There are many times where I’ve stopped and said, “boy I’m exhausted!  I need a break!” and then never do so.  This is the pain of inertia that hits when we know we need to stop but don’t for fear of never starting up again.  I think that fear, rather than pride, keeps us from doing those things that we recognize that we need to do.  I fear letting things go, I fear appearing lazy while others (who aren’t taking care of themselves) push on, I fear lots of things.  Overcoming that fear again only comes with time, honesty, and practice.

When the world doesn’t fall apart when I let go of it, or when I stop caring what others think of me, or when I stop comparing myself to the “saints” around me, that itself is self-care!

Sound like grace to anybody?

Grace, Part II

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I wrote previously on grace, stating that I have a hard time believing in it.  That’s true, but still not quite accurate.  I believe in God’s grace – including his grace toward me.  It’s all encompassing and all surpassing.  However I think that, just as Jesus’ parable of the sower relates, that reception of grace is so often stolen away or starved by lack of nourishment.

The third chapter in Keller’s book deals with idolatry, the “sin beneath the sin”.  It’s common to see material things as idols (cars, home, money), as well as work, power, all those things.  Keller makes a wonderful point though, that an idol is anything that we pursue more than God’s grace.  And that thing that we pursue might not be something that we love, it might be something that we fear.  He notes that we are driven not just our dreams, but even more so by our nightmares.

And that gave me pause – there are many things that I love, but how many more things that I fear!  I’m the type of personality that tends to be anxious and depressed a good deal of the time.  In the Old Testament era especially, we see so many gods and goddesses around.  These gods were worshiped not for love but to either get something (based on fear of not getting something, like rain) or not get something (like plague).  The Israelites inevitably returned to the foreign gods not out of love or merely out of cultural blending, but I think out of fear.  The fear that God would hold back or punish.  So they kept their options open, just like I do.

But I don’t run to a wooden idol,  I run to the idol of myself – my own actions, my own work, my own need to do good and be good.  I don’t see this as pride, as one of my friends likes to call it.  It doesn’t feel prideful.  It feels afraid.

Perfect love casts out all fear…

and off to do a funeral!

Grace

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In my church we’re doing a study of Timothy Keller’s book/DVD series “Gospel in Life: Grace Changes Everything”.  I’ve only just started but I’m hoping that this will be a strong influence in my walk right now, as grace is a major issue in my life.

I’ve had a very hard time really believing in God’s grace.  At first I wanted to say understanding God’s grace, but I rewrote that.  I think I understand it fine.  I don’t think that I apply it though.

I think that this is a major problem for a lot of Christians, and Keller identifies this as Christians being religious and Chrisitians being gospel to themselves and the world.  I think most of us can give the nuts and bolts of what grace is, quote the appropriate verses and authors, and make it sound as if we have it completely together.  Yet we understand grace but so often fail to live it and experience it.

I am having one difficulty with Keller though.  Maybe it’s not as much of a difficulty as it is something just not jiving with my own experience.  Keller often states that Christians tend to fall into moralism and works in order to credit their own salvation.  While this certainly can be true, this doesn’t ring true to me.  When I think about my own salvation and need for forgiveness, I do tend to fall sometimes on the need to make myself feel worthy of God’s grace.  But when I think about why I strive for approval, try to gain acceptance and feel worthy, it doesn’t feel as much about earning my salvation to me as it is about self-worth.  Perhaps my bigger issue with grace and accepting it as the free gift of God is how little I apparently cherish it.  I strive so much more for the approval of others that I ignore the free gift in front of me.

I see many areas in my life where I have sought that blessing – from family, from work, from achievements, from parents and so on.  And when I have that blessing it isn’t enough, because it still isn’t God’s blessing.  So why chase so much after approval and the blessing of others when God’s approval and blessing have already been given?

Know, Be, Do

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The biggest part of CPE is the process itself.  It’s not a matter of learning something new and then showing that you’ve learned it, as in a typical classroom.  You are the classroom and you are the textbook.

In fact, CPE and chaplaincy depend very little on knowledge.  Rather it depends on wisdom, developed over time and only through experience.  Many enter in to CPE thinking that either it will be like a college class or a small-group devotional.  In my experience, that couldn’t be further from the truth.  The CPE group develops in a dymanic way, with each member of the group giving and taking with the ultimate goal of building pastoral identity and wisdom.  That wisdom is not gained easily though, not just through navel-gazing or drum-beating.

John Patton in Pastoral Care: The Essential Guide writes “Pastoral wisdom involves our knowing, being and doing.”  Sound profound?  Yeah, did to me to.  However it’s true, but here’s how I understand it.

Knowing involves not simply knowing a fact.  In pastoral care, this knowledge is not just knowledge of scripture or doctrine.  It is the knowledge of your self – strengths, weaknesses, history, pain, story, shames, successes and so on.  CPE involves a great deal of this self-identification, which is sometimes easy and sometimes hard.  I think lots of folks have experiences in CPE because they try hard to maintain false selves while the group or supervisor try even harder to tear that false self down.

Being involves accepting those things we are aware of through self-knowlege.  Too often self-awareness leads to self-rejection, I think.  The hard parts of my life are just a part of me as the good parts, yet I find I tried for so long to judge those hard parts as things to be set aside or avoided.  I reject negative parts of myself as not really me, but that only sets up a false knowledge of who I really am.  However when I accept my past and my self and my past without judgement I can use them both to work with others in the midst of their own story and pain, and also help them to see their own true self without judgement.  This is not saying that sin isn’t sin or that “I’m all good”.  It involves seeing myself as I truly am, not how I view myself or how I want others to view me – it is how God sees me.  And in Christ, God sees me without judgement.  I think that’s what grace is.

Doing is the acting upon that knowledge of who I really am, putting my self fully into interaction with others.  This is the essence of pastoral care, but it can only happen after the knowing and the being.

Anxiety

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My fourth CPE unit started yesterday.  I was surprised how anxious and nervous I was, but then again I wasn’t.  Right now there is only myself and one other chaplain to cover about 160 patients over about 5 counties.  I am trying to see my own patients, schedule the patients covered by our missing chaplain between the two of us remaining, interview new prospects and fight to get them hired, go to meetings, do bereavement work, meetings etc.  It’s hard and busy on normal days.  It feels impossible now – like my foot is on the gas and I can’t take it off.  Plus we’ve had a lot of things break at the house, including my printer (which involved a great waste of time and money before getting a new one) and most notably my car.

While not yet broken, its creaking scares me, as does the $900 it will be to get it to pass inspection next month.  Therefore I’m getting a new one.  But as is my custom I have gone completely overboard with researching cars, trying to find the best fit of cost-reliability-age-likeability, which is impossible.  I’ve been frustrated in that when I find the “perfect” one it is either gone or not nearly as perfect as it initially presented itself to be.

All this anxiety and fear for no good reason.  And when I get anxious like this I don’t sleep well, don’t take care of myself, become even more tired and distracted, and withdraw from other people.  I find now, and have in the past, that anxiety for me causes as downward spiral where I’m afraid to get off the treadmill for fear of what will happen, yet I’m too tired to go on.

Again, Merton was helpful today (haven’t read him in weeks).  He mentions his own anger, striving for clarity and freedom from attachments and pride.  We never really get rid of these, and remembering that a solitary monk still struggles with them helps me not wallow in it.

I try and rely on God, knowing that more often than not when I’m open to His plans and prodding, being patient all the while, my anxiousness leaves me.  Even just stopping and writing helps

 

The Message vs. The Medium

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Tucked into a relatively interesting email by The Gospel Coalition on the “death of postmodernism” was a piece promoting a New England church planting effort.  No big deal I thought, but then I read on:

Amusing Our Church to Death

The church-growth movement has bought into the entertainment paradigm with catastrophic results. The unfathomable riches of God’s wisdom in Christ just cannot be plumbed by video clips and sermons on loneliness. The Christian message—salvation for hell-deserving sinners through Christ’s death and resurrection by faith alone—has been subjugated to the entertainment paradigm and predictably distorted, truncated, and even lost altogether. As a result, the church has become increasingly ignorant of its faith and, not surprisingly, increasingly confused about its mission.

This gospel distortion has spread with mind-numbing speed, resulting in a near wholesale return to the liberal church mission of the early nineteenth century. Rob Bell now wants to “save Christians” from a heavenly fixation by having them focus on the here and now.

And many have done just that. Churches have allowed the medium to dilute the message to the detriment of the mission.

The Medium for the Message

Christianity is all about proclaiming the message of the gospel. So what is a fitting medium? The message actually contains the medium God has endorsed—the Word. In the beginning was the Word, and in these last times, God has spoken to us by that Word, his Son.

The Bible is the inscripturation of that Word. These 66 canonical books are the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. This we proclaim, as it was given and in its entirety. The message is the Word of the gospel, and that Word is the medium.

I see some problems with these arguments – glaring ones.  First off, I would agree that the church growth movement has some big warts at times.  Continue reading →

Doctrine

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I grew up so much in an religious environment where orthodoxy – not “O” like the church, but literally “saying the right thing” – was so important.  Knowledge of doctrine was pressed on us as much as knowlege of scripture.  Calvin may as well have been the 5th apostle.  And even when it came to scripture, we looked at it through the lens of doctrine.

I’m seeing now that I’m not nearly as focused or as interested in doctrine as I have been in the past.  That’s not to say that I’m not interested in doctrine, or that I think doctrine doesn’t matter.  But I do think that doctrine, arguments over doctrine, and pragmataic orthodoxy have had too much weight in the conservative churches.

Full disclosure for a minute: I grew up Presbyterian, first within the PCUSA but mostly within the Presbyterian Church in America, it’s stricter fundamentalist stepchild.  My pastor for most of that time would mention pornography and “filthy lucre” every sermon regardless of topic or scripture passage.  The youth group had a running bet on this.  The pastor read from King James only, even though the pew bibles were NIV.  The lecture we got on the evils of rock music included Dio and Iron Maiden but Neil Diamond.

Anyway my church focused so much on doctrine – on knowing what was right doctrine (i.e. Calvinism) and why other doctrines (i.e. Arminianism) were wrong – that I think the gospel got lost.  It started to become about comparing ourselves to other Christians and not being in error.

As I’ve become familiar with the breadth of experience in other Christian traditions, and come to understand some of the doctrines behind them, I’ve started to not really care so much about being right.  There’s a lot of “right” in my tradition, but there is also a lot of “right” in other traditions that can inform my own faith and walk.  In the same way, there are “wrongs” in some traditions, but I also need to look critically at my own beliefs as well and be willing to change.

Also, I’ve seen that focusing so much on being right can really stunt your walk.  After all, if you’re right, you only have to worry about maintaining the status quo, where you are.  But you don’t grow!  And if you’re not growing…

Sample CPE Verbatim: A bit of what Clinical Pastoral Education does

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I thought I’d throw in a sample verbatim that I presented in CPE a few weeks ago.  These are presented in class and are a pretty significant part of what we do.  After a patient visit we write it up similarly to what you see below, although there are a lot of different ways to do it.  The main reason is to have the group look at what you did, ask questions, and look at the visit from a number of different angles.  Plus, the writing down of the visit and reflecting back on it afterward is very helpful in your own education.  I don’t write up every visit obviously, and while I used to look to try and find the “perfect visit” you can pretty much find something interesting in every visit you do.

Names and places have been changed obviously.  This references the Association of Professional Chaplains’ Common Standards, available here.  And pardon the weird formatting but I’m not fixing it on Monday morning.

Continue reading →

Theology of Practice II

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“…And what does the LORD require of you?  To act justly, and to love mercy and to walk
humbly with your God.” Micah 6:8

“To act Justly”

In my ministry, right action is not something that is set in stone.  Every encounter is new and involves no fewer than three people: myself, the other, and God.  Imposing my own plan based merely on what I think is necessary or important may hinder the process of that encounter and denies the needs of the other, as well as the working of God.  This does not mean that I am a passive observer, but that I act based not on my own preconceived notions but on what is revealed in the moment  encounter both God and the other.  Freeing myself from my own “should’s” beforehand will make me more open to what “could” be as well as to what God or the patient is telling me “could” be.  Acting justly, in the context of hospice chaplaincy, refrains from judgment and instead seeks to discover and celebrate meaning when possible, and to walk with
them in the silence when it isn’t.  The dying also may not have basic spiritual, emotional or physical needs met, and acting justly also requires that I advocate for them during those times.

“and to love Mercy”

Mercy can mean loving in spite of circumstances, not simply the putting aside of justice.  Just action will be merciful.  If action toward the dying is not merciful, it is not just.  My patients may be dealing with guilt and shame resulting from past wrongs, or a past injury to their self, that makes them feel outside of God’s mercy.  In other cases, they may be at peace and fully holding on to God’s mercy as I sign of His love and acceptance.  As chaplain I am not only a conduit of God’s mercy through prayer and counseling, but through my presence.  God’s mercy can be present to them because I am present to them.  In a similar way, because God is working through those I encounter in my life as well, God’s
mercy is shown to me in the lives of my patients and families.  In the same way as they receive mercy through me – I receive mercy and am reminded to be merciful to myself – through them.

“and to walk Humbly with your God.”

Humility is not self-abasement; rather it is fully recognizing my value through God’s gift of acceptance.  True humility then is not a matter of valuing myself more or less than another.  Instead it looks at life as inherently valuable and worthy, worthy enough for salvation through the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.  Humility comes from recognizing that this value is not from my own doing or work, but through
Jesus’ mercy and action first.  This is something that is very much in process for me, but “walking” implies a journey rather than a destination.